Right to Life

Jack Ketcham Right to Life

"… endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights… unong these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness…"

– Thomas Jefferson

"God finds you naked and he leaves you dying. What happens in between is up to you."

– Robin Hitchcock and the Egyptians

THE FIRST DAY

ONE

New York City

June 8, 1998

10:20 a.m.

They drove to the clinic in silence.

The night before they'd said it all. Now there was nothing left to say.

It just remained to do it. Get it over with.

Morning rush hour traffic had ended over an hour ago and traffic was fairly light. The streets of the Upper West Side seemed strangely still and dreamlike, the blue-green Toyota van in front of them drifting from stoplight to stoplight like a guide taking them from nowhere to some other nowhere while they followed to no determinate end.

Running on empty, Greg thought. Both of us.

The silence turned him back in time to their bed last night in her apartment, making love through a haze of tears which came and went with the gentle anguished regularity of waves at low tide, their very heartbeats muted, the two of them drawn more closely together than they had ever imagined or wished possible in the grim sad knowledge that pleasure now was also pain and would remain so for a very long time. Her tears cooling on his cheek and mingling with his own, the musky smell of tears and then the feel of them falling to his chest as she sailed astride him like a ship on a windless sea and when it was finished, the long dark night embracing in warm attempted sleep.

Then stillness too through the loud morning rituals of water, razor and toothbrush, both he and Sara alone now in these things as they would ever be. Then coffee drunk in silence at the table, Greg reaching out to take her hand a moment across the polished pine to feel the warmth of her again, to bind them for a moment before walking out through the door into the cool bright morning air. To the morning errands of New Yorkers along 91st and West End Avenue, the cars and cabs and delivery trucks. And then down to the car parked deep in the cooler echoing basement garage next door, Greg driving them across to Broadway and then downtown. Bringing them forward along the wheel of time to this awful empty place. This quiet, this exhausted drift of feeling.

"Are you all right?" he said finally.

She nodded.

The clinic wasn't far. 68th and Broadway, only five blocks away. One of only three of them left open on the entire West Side from the Village to the Bronx.

"It's a girl," she said.

And it was that, he thought and not his question that truly broke the silence.

"How can you tell?"

"I just know. I remember the way Daniel felt, even at this stage. This feels… different."

He was aware of something thick and heavy inside him again. He'd heard the story many times in the six years he'd known her. Her perceptions of the thing varying slightly over time and distance and depth of understanding. Daniel, her son, dead in a frozen lake in upstate New York at the age of six. Even his body lost to her beneath the ice and never found.

If there was ever a woman he would have wished to have a child with, to have raised his child, especially a girl-child, it was this one.

His hands were sweating on the wheel.

Because of course it was impossible.

"Why don't you drop me off in front," she said. "Find a place to park. I'll go in and register. Less time waiting."

"Are you sure?"

"The front will be fine."

"What about those people with their goddamn picket lines. They'll probably be out again."

"They don't bother me. Except to piss me off. They'll let me by, don't worry."

He supposed that – no, she was not about to be intimidated. Last week going in for her examination there had been seven of them on the sidewalk by the entrance to the Jamaica Savings Bank, the building which housed the clinic and held its tenuous lease, seven men and women standing behind blue police barricades, carrying cardboard signs saying HE'S A CHILD, NOT A CHOICE and ABORTION IS LEGALIZED GENOCIDE and waving pamphlets and holding out tiny plastic twelve-week foetuses cupped in the palms of their hands.

One of them, a surprisingly handsome fortyish man, shoved his own little specimen at Sara's face and Sara turned on Greg's arm and said you stupid shit and walked on by past the three policemen lounging at the door who were guarding these creeps on his and her tax dollars thank you very much, and into the building.